Mozart Week 2017

The Salzburg
Mozarteum Foundation presents the Mozart Week from 26 January until 5 February
2017

Horses! For thousands of years they have served humanity in all sorts of
ways and have been an inspiration to all the arts, indeed in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) the satirist
Jonathan Swift made them the rulers of a better world, free from suffering,
hunger and disease, in which human beings are merely lowly domestic animals. In
his Aesthetics of Ugliness (1853)
Hegel’s pupil Karl Rosenkranz counted them among the most beautiful creatures
in the animal kingdom.

Under the circumstances it is remarkable that it took so long for horses
to return to Salzburg’s
Felsenreitschule, which was originally built for them. Those lucky enough to
attend the 2015 production of Mozart’s Davide
penitente by Bartabas and his team from the Académie équestre de Versailles
still rave about what an exhilarating, trailblazing experience it was. Our
delight at having solved the enormous technical and logistical challenges posed
by both the human and the equine performers, but also the wealth of new
experiences we made in the process, gave us a burning desire to extend our
newly-acquired knowledge to achieve an even higher peak of artistic perfection.
You can experience the result in this year’s production of Mozart’s Requiem.